Thursday, 31 May 2012

This article on a Japanese website seems to sum up the disaster for Turkey's foreign relations that is the islamist PM Erdogan. From just over a year ago trumpeting zero problems with any of its neighbours, Turkey now has problems with all of them, and has also realised that the Iranian bomb might threaten his country (just yesterday Turkey announced its joining of the nuclear arms race for 'health' reasons with its new particle accelerator. It would seem that Erdogan has set his heart on another islamic bomb. Israel should take notice and maybe reformulate 'flame' and 'stuxnet' accordingly). But that little matter doesn't stop islamist Erdogan constantly upping the ante re Israel and Cyprus and threatening war. Nato is heartily sick of him, and his only friend in the world seems to be......... yes you guessed it....... Obama. Obama is the true snake in the grass, professing friendship to Israel at every turn whilst undermining Israel and western allies at every opportunity. Obama's arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Turkey this year alone dwarfs anything Israel will be able to put in the field against them. It's just lucky that whereas Turkey and Saudi Arabia buy weapons off the shelf from the US, Israel puts added value into them.

I would take issue with the authors' statements about Syria being an internal issue as Syria has had its fingers in many pies throughout the middle east, fomented terror and the assassination of a PM of Hariri along with many politicians, bringing about the political ascendancy of Hezbolla. Syria's internal affairs are of interest to all middle eastern nations, whether or not Israel for example decides not to try and involve itself in that bubbling cauldron. But otherwise the article seems to be quite on target.

Turkey has managed to alienate all of its friends with the exception maybe of Azerbaijan, and that only because of Turkey's blockade of Armenia which grabbed Nagorno Karabach off the Azeris in a textbook operation of ethnic cleansing.

Erdogan lambasted Iran by stating that this nation “lacked honesty” and that this country was “losing their international prestige.”

"A former diplomat of Turkey, Sinan Ulgen, commented that “It is his (Erdogan's) posturing that has led to crises with our neighbors. If he hadn’t approached matters in a polarizing, black-and-white fashion, we wouldn’t have lost the ability to manage these relationships.”

“Instead of being the last person to intervene, very often he is the first to react. What he says then becomes policy, and limits Turkey’s room for maneuver; it corners us and policy becomes ossified.”

Tuesday, 29 May 2012

One of the books I dip into from time to time is John Simpson's book 'Unreliable Sources'. Anyone who is amazed at how seemingly the whole corpus of journalists slants the news and reports unsubstantiated and mostly lying arab propaganda about Israel would do well to read this book. In nigh on 600 pages.

John Simpson doesn't mention the arab-Israel conflict once. He doesn't seem to be aware of 'Pallywood' or of how his fellow journalists have suspended journalistic skepticism to swallow whole propaganda such as the blood libel of Mohammed Dura supposedly killed by Israelis. And the journalists who went to a press conference in Gaza supposedly being held by candle light through lack of electricity owing to the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Of course the room had been blacked out as the chinks of light coming through the curtains showed. The journalists present failed to mention that fact in their reports in the press and on television.

Maybe John Simpson does not wish to invite the opprobrium that would be heaped upon him were he to write about his colleagues shameful prostitution of their profession in the cause of the so-called palestinians, but his book is the weaker because of it.

Simpson goes into detail about how British journalists have been turning a blind eye to facts which don't fit in with their world view or with British policy ever since the Boer War over a hundred years ago.

"There are plenty of villains.... journalists who through laziness or conceit or ideological tunnel vision chose not to find out what was really going on. There is Bennet Burleigh of the Daily Telegraph who, without actually bothering to go and check out the facts, assured the nation that there was no truth in the stories that Boer woman and children were dying like flies in the British concentration camps in south Africa."

And then there were the anti-semitic press barons such as the pro nazi Lord Rothermere publisher of the Daily Mail who wrote to Hitler congratulating him on annexing Czechoslovakia in 1939. Lord Beaverbrook who basked in the society of nazi ambassador Ribbentrop and who in December 1938 when the pre-war nazi persecution of jews in Germany was at its height said incorrectly,

"The jews have got a big position in the press here. I estimate that one third of the circulation of the Daily Telegraph is Jewish. The Daily Mirror may be owned by Jews. The Daily Herald is owned by jews. And the News Chronicle should really be the Jews Chronicle. Not because of ownership but because of sympathy."

The anti-semitic British press of yesteryear has mutated into an anti-Israel press of today although not even concealing the hatred of jews if they can be described as 'settlers'. Anti-semitism updates itself for a new age. Herzl's comment that antisemitism is a virus has never been more true as we see with nazi style boycotts against the jewish state, often organized by jews indoctrinated into hatred of their own people and Israel by western media, and a total ignorance of Israel and its history.

Interesting also is how the British establishment by way of 'heavy breathing' i.e. bringing political pressure to bear on the BBC and press, rather than actually censoring reports, managed to keep many unwanted facts about the nazis and their barbarism out of the news in pre-WWII Britain.

This pressure kept Winston Churchill out of the BBC and even had his column in Beaverbrook's Evening Standard taken away from him.

So let's not be surprised when the British media, the BBC the Guardian, the Independent distort news about Israel. They are only carrying on a great British tradition learned long ago in South Africa and when appeasing the nazis.

Friday, 25 May 2012

The Elder of ziyon explains how the successful arab propaganda campaign to delegitimise Israel came about:

The Palestinian Arab plan for de-legitimizing Israel, 1968

In 1968, Israel was still considered the small - but admirable - survivor of a war meant to destroy, waged by the combined forces of much of the Arab world. Israeli were, to the Western world, the "good guys."

It would be a gross understatement to say that this has changed in the intervening years. The entire framework of how Israel is viewed has been turned completely around, by a very successful campaign of de-legitimization that has cumulatively paid off in spades since then.

The blueprint for this sea change in how the world views Israel was written in 1968.

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Documentary Record, by Yehuda Lukacs, reproduces a number of hard to find documents about the conflict. On page 295 one can find the Palestine National Assembly Political Resolutions, 17 July, 1968.

This is a most illuminating document.

While parts of it are obviously dated, these resolutions give an eerily exact plan on how the Palestinian Arabs plotted out the propaganda war against Israel.

Here are the entire section on Methods:
1. The Palestinian Arab people have chosen the course of armed struggle in the fight to recover their usurped territories and rights. The current phase in their armed struggle started before the defeat of June, 1967 and has endured and escalated ever since. Moreover, despite the fact that this struggle renders a service to the entire Arab nation at the present stage, insofar as it prevents the enemy from laying claim to a status quo based on surrender, and insofar as it keeps the flame of resistance alive and maintains a climate of war, preoccupies the enemy and is an object of concern to the entire world community, that struggle is nevertheless a true and distinct expression of the aspirations of the Palestinian Arab people and is inspired by their objectives. In addition, we feel bound to declare quite frankly that this struggle goes beyond the scope of what it has become customary to call “the elimination of the consequences of the aggression", and all other such slogans, for the objectives of this struggle are those of the Palestinian Arab people, as set out in the preceding paragraph. The fight will not cease; it will continue, escalate and expand until final victory is won, no matter how long it takes and regardless of the sacrifices involved.

2. The enemy has chosen Blitzkrieg as the form of combat most suitable to him, in view of the tactical mobility at his command which enabled him, at the moment of battle, to unleash forces superior to those deployed by the Arabs. The enemy chose this method in the belief that a lightning victory would lead to surrender, according to the pattern of I948, and not to Arab armed resistance. In dealing with it, we must adopt a method derived from elements of strength in ourselves and elements of weakness in the enemy.

3. The enemy consists of three interdependent forces:
a) Israel.
b) World Zionism.
c) World imperialism, under the direction of the United States of America.

Moreover, it is incontestable that world imperialism makes use of the forces of reaction linked with colonialism.

If we are to achieve victory and gain our objectives, we shall have to strike at the enemy wherever he may be, and at the nerve centres of his power. This is to be achieved through the use of military, political and economic weapons and information media, as part of a unified and comprehensive plan designed to sap his strength, scatter his forces, destroy the links between them and undermine their common objectives.

4. A long-drawn out battle has the advantage of allowing us to expose world Zionism, its activities, conspiracies, and its complicity with world imperialism and to point out the damage and complications it causes to the interests and the security of many countries, and the threat it constitutes to world peace. This will eventually unmask it, bringing to light the grotesque facts of its true nature, and will isolate it from the centres of power and establish safeguards against its ever reaching them...

5. An information campaign must be launched that will throw light on the following facts:

a) The true nature of the Palestinian war is that of a battle between a small people, which is the Palestinian people, and Israel, which has the backing of world Zionism and world imperialism.

b) This war will have its effect on the interests of any country that supports lsrael or world Zionism.

c) The hallmark of the Palestinian Arab people is resistance, struggle and liberation, that of the enemy, aggression, usurpation and the disavowal of all values governing decent human relations.

6. A comprehensive plan must be drawn up to fuse the Arab struggle and the Palestinian struggle into a single battle. This requires concentrated ideological, information and political effort that will make it clear to the Arab nation that it can never enjoy peace or security until the tide of Zionist invasion is stemmed, and that its territory will be occupied piecemeal unless it deploys its resources in the battle, not to mention the extent to which the Zionist presence constitutes a drain on its resources and an impediment to the development of its society.

Palestinian action regards the Arab nation as a reserve fund of political, financial and human resources on which it can draw, and whose support and participation will make it possible to fight the successive stages in the battle.

7. The peoples and governments of the Arab nation must be made to understand that they are under an obligation to protect the Palestinian struggle so that it may be able to confront the enemy on firm ground and direct all its forces and capabilities to this confrontation, fully assured of its own safety and security. This obligation is not only a national duty, it is a necessity deriving from the fact that the Palestinian struggle is the vanguard in the defence of all Arab countries, Arab territories and Arab aspirations.

8. Any objective study of the enemy will reveal that his potential for endurance, except where a brief engagement is concerned, is limited. The drain on this potential that can be brought about by a long-drawn out engagement will inevitably provide the opportunity for a decisive confrontation in which the entire Arab nation can take part and emerge victorious.

It is the duty of Palestinians everywhere to devote themselves to making the Arab nation aware of these facts, and to propagating the will to struggle. It is also their duty to endure, sacrifice and take part in the struggle.
While the PLO has not been as successful in rallying the Arab nations behind it in recent years, its propaganda plan has been executed flawlessly. Even though their plan describes how the Palestinian Arabs are part of, and depend on the help of, the much larger Arab nation, they present themselves as an isolated, tiny, besieged and victimized entity to the West, compared to the huge Israel/World Zionist/imperialist alliance.

Any glance at a map reveals the absurdity of the idea that Israel has territorial designs on the larger Arab world, or that it is an expansionist, imperialist state. Yet years of repetition of the points listed in this document - repeated in the media, repeated on college campuses, repeated by the useful idiots of the Left and the latent anti-semites of the world - have made them appear self-evident to nearly everybody.

Not only that, but this document foreshadows the terrorist spree of the 1970s. That string of high-profile attacks against Western targets was a successful implementation of section 5b, where the Palestinian Arabs let the West know that any support of Israel will result in their citizens getting killed. Over time, that idea became crystallized in many countries' collective psyches to turn their political viewpoints towards defending their nations from terror - and believing that by sacrificing Israel, they would achieve short-term security. They of course justified their abandoning Israel in terms of human rights and justice, and their excuses took liberally from the brand new Palestinian Arab narrative - a narrative that was created expressly for the purpose of isolating Israel from the West!

US resolution 242, this document bitterly notes, did not even mention Palestinian Arabs. In 1967, it was obvious that the conflict was between Israel and the much larger Arab nation, and that the refugees and their descendants were pawns of the Arab world. The policies that resulted from the PLO decisions to implement this plan effectively created the "Palestinian people" ex nihilo from the perspective of the Western nations. (This document is also explicitly against creating a Palestinian Arab state in the territories, calling it a Zionist plan and saying that such a state would serve Zionist objectives.)

While their military plans from 1968 only had limited success, the PLO's propaganda plan was executed brilliantly, and it continues to this day.

Sunday, 20 May 2012

A film called the “Jews of Egypt”
is being released soon in Egypt. The trailer shows egyptian jews
loyal to Egypt and innocent of any crime who were ethnically cleansed
from Egypt. This is now happening with the Copts albeit in slower
motion. It is believed that around a quarter of a million copts have
left Egypt in the last year.

One of the jews who was kicked out the
country was Henri Curiel, a revolutionary who later headed the
Algerian FLN. He had previously been one of the jews rounded up by
Egyptian police during the Second World War. The pro nazi Egyptian
authorities had hoped to give the Germans a 'goodwill' present of
jews when they marched into Cairo.

The ANC received much support from the
Solidarité organisation set
up to help revolutionaries benefit from the skill gained over many
years by Curiel and his friends. It is possible that Solidarité
had become such a thorn in the
side of the apartheid regime of South Africa that it decided to kill
him. Anyway Curiel was killed by a couple of assassins and the
killers and who sent them are still unknown.

Curiel's
greatest coup apart from divesting France from one of its
'departments', Algeria was of delivering in advance the plans of the1956 attack
by Britain, France and Israel to Nasser. As with Stalin's receipt of
the plans of operation 'Barbarossa', it doesn't seem to have helped
much to defend the country and Israel's forces reacting to the closing of the Straits of Tiran to their shipping, routed the Egyptians in
100 hours. Maybe however this foreknowledge explains why Ariel Sharon's forces fell
into a strongly prepared trap when he moved forces into the strategic Mitla Pass. Curiel's treacherous actions towards France the country that had given him refuge and Israel were made in favour of a country that had expelled around 40,000 jews ( Once Algeria became independent it also expelled its jews in 1962 after taking away their citizenship).

Nasser's reward was to order Curiel to get his Egyptian citizenship back. It didn't happen however.

----------

“In 1942, when Cairo seemed about to
fall to Rommel’s Afrikakorps, the wealthy Jewish community crowded
into trains heading for Jerusalem. Henri Curiel decided to remain,
intending to organise resistance in the event of Nazi occupation.
Without the knowledge of the British authorities, he was arrested by
the Egyptian police, who were busy rounding up the remaining Jews as
a welcoming present for the victorious German army. The prison was
full of Egyptian agents working for the Nazis who had been arrested
by British counter-intelligence. From his cell, Curiel heard
thousands of demonstrators chant the name of Rommel. It was a
shattering discovery. The mass of Egyptians were playing Hitler
against Churchill. Those later known as the Free Officers, led by
Anwar Al Sadat, were plotting with German intelligence and preparing
to stab the British in the back. Was this connivance with Nazi
ideology? Egyptian patriots were clearly prepared to form an alliance
with the devil. “

“Apart from the Muslim Brotherhood,
the Egyptian people had not reacted strongly. But defeat in the first
Arab-Israeli war was felt as an unbearable humiliation. Hundreds of
communist militants had been arrested as soon as martial law was
declared. For the Jews among them, their fate was sealed. In the
words of Raymond Stambouli, a comrade of Curiel: "The war
spelled the end of everything we had dreamed of and were beginning to
achieve. We considered ourselves Egyptians, even if the Egyptians
themselves considered us foreigners. Now it was over. We were no
longer simply foreigners. We were Jews, i.e. enemies, a potential
fifth column. Which of us could have foreseen that?"

“In November 1957 he introduced him to Francis Jeanson, who was
running a support network for the FLN (Algerian National Liberation
Front). The network had been in existence for a year but had set up a
proper organisational structure only a month before. For three years
Henri Curiel devoted his organisational abilities and exceptional
militant energy to the FLN support network. His wife Rosette worked
with him, as did Joyce Blau and Didar Fawzi Rossano, both of whom had
come from Egypt. When several activists were rounded up by the French
security services, and Francis Jeanson’s cover was blown, the
Algerians asked Henri Curiel to take over.”

On 20 October 1960 Henri Curiel was arrested. He spent
eighteen months in prison. Once the peace agreements had been signed,
the deportation order issued at the time of his arrest ought normally
to have been executed. He escaped deportation thanks to old and
powerful connections. In Cairo, in 1943, his Amitiés Françaises
organisation had rendered important services to Free French
resistance workers, some of whom were now ministers in De Gaulle’s
cabinet.

When he emerged from Fresnes prison at the age of forty eight, he
knew he had been banished to the sidelines. But if he could not find
a place in any organisation, he could act as a linchpin. His
intellectual training and vast reading had made him a repository of
European revolutionary experience. For years he had worked side by
side with militants who had learnt the skills of underground activity
under the Nazi occupation or in helping the FLN. He decided to make
those skills available to third-world liberation movements whose
organisational weaknesses he knew well since his time in Egypt

On this basis, Curiel set up an organisation that came to be known
as Solidarité. It was a centre for the provision of services.
A few dozen militants, most of them French, with widely varying
backgrounds and affiliations (Protestant clergyman, trade unionists,
Catholic priests, members of the Communist Party acting on an
individual basis, etc.) placed themselves modestly at the service of
other militants from all over the world. Their aim was not to act as
political mentors, but simply to teach a number of crucial skills
that could make all the difference. How to detect and shake off a
shadow, print leaflets with a portable press, forge documents. How to
use codes and invisible ink. Basic medical care and first aid.
Possibly the use of arms and explosives. How to read maps, interpret
terrain, and so on. Many of the instructors had doubts about the
usefulness of such brief periods of training. But the trainees’
tragic lack of experience soon convinced them. Militants like those
from the ANC, exposed to the cruellest and most sophisticated
repression, turned out to know nothing of the elementary rules of
underground activity.

Thursday, 17 May 2012

Those targeting Israel with their various boycotts have not invented anything new. Looking through Vallentine's Jewish Encyclopaedia (1938) under 'Pogrom' I came across the "Cold Pogrom" (p531)

"Cold Pogrom" is a current term invented by the London Times, for the economic boycott and persecution practiced against the Jews in Poland and Germany. S.G.

Boycotting jews never went away but as with traditional anti-semitism the boycott has been updated by jew haters for modern times. This website makes no bones about who is the target and openly calls to boycott 500 jewish businesses.

Wednesday, 16 May 2012

What Happened to Israel's Reputation? (Oren) (updated) Nice piece in WSJ by Michael Oren. Since it will be paywalled soon, I'm posting the entire article.

This year Israel is celebrating . . . a series of accomplishments that have surely exceeded the expectations of its most visionary founders. It is one of the most powerful small nations in history. . . . [It] has tamed an arid wilderness [and] welcomed 1.25 million immigrants. . . . The Israelis themselves did the fighting, the struggling, the sacrificing in order to perform the greatest feat of all—forging a new society . . . in which pride and confidence have replaced the despair engendered by age-long suffering and persecution.

So Life magazine described Israel on the occasion of its 25th birthday in May 1973. In a 92-page special issue, "The Spirit of Israel," the magazine extolled the Jewish state as enlightened, robustly democratic and hip, a land of "astonishing achievement" that dared "to dream the dream and make that dream come alive."

Life told the story of Israel's birth from the Bible through the Holocaust and the battle for independence. "The Arabs' bloodthirsty threats," the editors wrote, "lend a deadly seriousness to the vow: Never Again." Four pages documented "Arab terrorist attacks" and the three paragraphs on the West Bank commended Israeli administrators for respecting "Arab community leaders" and hiring "tens of thousands of Arabs." The word "Palestinian" scarcely appeared.

There was a panoramic portrayal of Jerusalem, described as "the focus of Jewish prayers for 2,000 years" and the nucleus of new Jewish neighborhoods. Life emphasized that in its pre-1967 borders, Israel was "a tiny, parched, scarcely defensible toe-hold." The edition's opening photo shows a father embracing his Israeli-born daughter on an early "settlement," a testament to Israel's birthright to the land.

Would a mainstream magazine depict the Jewish state like this today, during the week of its 64th birthday?

Unlikely. Rather, readers would learn about Israel's overwhelming military might, brutal conduct in warfare and eroding democratic values—plus the Palestinians' plight and Israeli intransigence. The photographs would show not cool students and cutting-edge artists but soldiers at checkpoints and religious radicals.

Why has Israel's image deteriorated? After all, Israel today is more democratic and—despite all the threats it faces—even more committed to peace.

Some claim that Israel today is a Middle Eastern power that threatens its neighbors, and that conservative immigrants and extremists have pushed Israel rightward. Most damaging, they contend, are Israel's policies toward the territories it captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, toward the peace process and the Palestinians, and toward the construction of settlements.

Israel may seem like Goliath vis-à-vis the Palestinians, but in a regional context it is David. Gaza is host to 10,000 rockets, many of which can hit Tel Aviv, and Hezbollah in Lebanon has 50,000 missiles that place all of Israel within range. Throughout the Middle East, countries with massive arsenals are in upheaval. And Iran, which regularly pledges to wipe Israel off the map, is developing nuclear weapons. Israel remains the world's only state that is threatened with annihilation.

Whether in Lebanon, the West Bank or Gaza, Israel has acted in self-defense after suffering thousands of rocket and suicide attacks against our civilians. Few countries have fought with clearer justification, fewer still with greater restraint, and none with a lower civilian-to-militant casualty ratio. Israel withdrew from Lebanon and Gaza to advance peace only to receive war in return.

Whereas Israelis in 1973 viewed the creation of a Palestinian state as a mortal threat, it is now the official policy of the Israeli government. Jewish men of European backgrounds once dominated Israel, but today Sephardic Jews, Arabs and women are prominent in every facet of society. This is a country where a Supreme Court panel of two women and an Arab convicted a former president of sexual offenses. It is the sole Middle Eastern country with a growing Christian population. Even in the face of immense security pressures, Israel has never known a second of nondemocratic rule.

In 1967, Israel offered to exchange newly captured territories for peace treaties with Egypt and Syria. The Arab states refused. Israel later evacuated the Sinai, an area 3.5 times its size, for peace with Egypt, and it conceded land and water resources for peace with Jordan.

In 1993, Israel recognized the Palestinian people ignored by Life magazine, along with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the perpetrator of those "Arab terrorist attacks." Israel facilitated the creation of a Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza and armed its security forces. Twice, in 2000 and 2008, Israel offered the Palestinians a state in Gaza, virtually all of the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. In both cases, the Palestinians refused. Astonishingly, in spite of the Palestinian Authority's praise for terror, a solid majority of Israelis still support the two-state solution.

Israel has built settlements (some before 1973), and it has removed some to promote peace, including 7,000 settlers to fulfill the treaty with Egypt. Palestinians have rebuffed Israel's peace offers not because of the settlements—most of which would have remained in Israel anyway, and which account for less than 2% of the West Bank—but because they reject the Jewish state. When Israel removed all settlements from Gaza, including their 9,000 residents, the result was a terrorist ministate run by Hamas, an organization dedicated to killing Jews world-wide.

Nevertheless, Israeli governments have transferred large areas to the Palestinian Authority and much security responsibility to Palestinian police. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has removed hundreds of checkpoints, eased the Gaza land blockade and joined President Obama in calling for the resumption of direct peace talks without preconditions. Addressing Congress, Mr. Netanyahu declared that the emergence of a Palestinian state would leave some settlements beyond Israel's borders and that "with creativity and with good will a solution can be found" for Jerusalem.

Given all this, why have anti-Israel libels once consigned to hate groups become media mainstays? How can we explain the assertion that an insidious "Israel Lobby" purchases votes in Congress, or that Israel oppresses Christians? Why is Israel's record on gay rights dismissed as camouflage for discrimination against others?

The answer lies in the systematic delegitimization of the Jewish state. Having failed to destroy Israel by conventional arms and terrorism, Israel's enemies alit on a subtler and more sinister tactic that hampers Israel's ability to defend itself, even to justify its existence.

It began with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat's 1974 speech to the U.N., when he received a standing ovation for equating Zionism with racism—a view the U.N. General Assembly endorsed the following year. It gained credibility on college campuses through anti-Israel courses and "Israel Apartheid Weeks." It burgeoned through the boycott of Israeli scholars, artists and athletes, and the embargo of Israeli products. It was perpetuated by journalists who published doctored photos and false Palestinian accounts of Israeli massacres.

Israel must confront the acute dangers of delegitimization as it did armies and bombers in the past. Along with celebrating our technology, pioneering science and medicine, we need to stand by the facts of our past. "The Spirit of Israel" has not diminished since 1973—on the contrary, it has flourished. The state that Life once lionized lives even more vibrantly today. I would say that the plot to delegitimize Israel came a few years before the 1974 speech, in 1968, but otherwise this is right on.

I could not find the Life article online, alas. But here's a copy of the cover (h/t Brad):

Tuesday, 15 May 2012

I've been reading "...Or Did I Dream a Dream?" (1973) by Ruth Dayan , Moshe Dayan's first wife. I'll add to this blog post from time to time as I read through the book.

The Moshe Dayan who emerges is the opposite of the arab hating fiend supposedly committed to killing and ethnically cleansing arabs, a story beloved of anti-zionist propagandists. What instead emerges is a reluctant warrior best at home on the moshav farm and its life, who had many arab friends and who hated war. But of course anyone who is not blinded by visceral anti-semitism or indoctrinated by Israel hating professors at any western university you care to name, knows that the history of the arab - israeli conflict has always been one of Israel defending itself against genocidal arab hatred of jews and the jewish state.

And if you read contemporary books written by the pioneers of Israel they are replete with unprovoked attacks on their communities. This is so different to the distortions of history put out nowadays that try to paint the jewish farmers as of initiating the violence, of a wish on the part of the jews to ethnically cleanse the arabs living in Palestine. Nothing is further from the truth.

In the 1930's arabs incited by their racist and anti-semitic leader Haj Amin El Husseini, otherwise known as the Mufti of Jerusalem stepped up attacks on jews and British government representatives whose tasks were setting up of schools and helping arabs modernise their agriculture with taxes raised from the jewish population.

The Haganah from 1936 found it had to develop the means of defending jewish farms and towns as British forces would rarely intervene to stop arab aggression against them. The sympathies of the majority of British forces were with the arab attackers until arabs turned their attentions to killing British soldiers.

Moshe Dayan was very actively involved in the Haganah, going on many actions with the Haganah and Orde Wingate's Special Night Squads. Orde Wingate a fervent christian was a very rare zionist in the British army, and he made many enemies because of his dedication to zionism and the indigenous jewish people's right to live in their own Land of Israel.

Despite like many others having to fight arabs for most of his life, Dayan never fell into the trap of hating arabs. He had many beduin and other friends and spoke perfect arabic having grown up amongst arabs.

Quotes from the book:

"And for us, trained attack dogs were often the difference between life and death: Laba once saved Moshe during a Bedouin ambush." (p57)

"When will there be peace? All I want is quieet, and all there is is terror, terror which we must fight. What will be the end? It's better not to think about that. Whatever happens, the main thing is to love one another. How awful it is when we fight!"(p60)

"Moshe was now a fighter, but he continued to long for solitude and peace: "Every night I go out on duty, and I don't understand it Why is all this necessary? Will it always be like this?"(p63)

"Nahman (close friend of Ruth's) sent brotherly notes from Shimron: "We're working on the forest and wondering when we'll be hearing from the Arabs, who have terrorized the whole neighborhood. We hear shots but from the hills; they haven't got to us yet....." (p65)

"We are starting to sow corn......There is talk about a possible Arab attack nearby...... (p67)

"I wrote a gay note describing a "close escape from death" when my father and mother and Reumah came to Shimron to drive me to Jerusalem. Arab attacks in 1938 were frequent and dangerous, and we had a wild ride, including pursuit by an armed Arab on a motorcycle who tried to force us to the side of the road where more armed Arabs stood. My description tells more about my mother than about our earlier relationship: "Mother wanted to stop and talk to the Arabs," I wrote, "but the rest of us insisted on driving on as quickly as we could" (p67)

Moshe Dayan and 42 other Haganah members were caught by the British out training with weapons. They received long prison sentences in Acre prison, a medieval fortress.

During the course of the trial I began to see the British in a different and terribly changed light. I had always liked them, and of course loved London. But now I began to hear soldiers-who did not know I understood English-talking about "those bloody jews."(p80)

One evening that winter I received a phone call.....It was from an Arab who was working in a match factory in Acre. "Regards from your husband," the srtanger's voice told me in English, "and don't worry." I had no idea what he was talking about and did not learn till later. Moshe had been caught with a prohibited tin of bully-beef, one of the food items we used to smuggle in, and his punishment was several days in solitary confinement.(p83)

On one visit I brought Yael, who at eighteen months was already walking. She managed to squeeze through the entanglements of barbed wire and throw her arms around her father. As they held each other through the wire, the child in a fluttering white dress and the kneeling man in a bronwn prison uniform, I heard the campt sergeant shout, "If you don't take that kid out I'll shoot!". The scene haunted me for months.(p86)

There were also Arab prisoners, detained fro illegal political activity, and relations between them and the Jewish prisoners were generally excellent. for the Feast of Ramadan that year the Jews ate in the Arab mess, and when some Bedouin prisoners from a tribe near Nahalal were also arrested, Moshe wrote with concern asking what had happened to those he knew. (p87)

In WWII after an indiscriminate Italian bombing of Tel-Aviv that had killed 99 people and injured hundreds. Haifa was attacked killing and injuring mostly arabs:

It was not the first time I had seen dead and wounded, for all through the thirties people had been killed in ambushes and attacks.

Italian planes struck Haifa once more. This time, in addition to the bombs, they dropped leaflets in Arabic claiming to be "Defenders of Islam." What they hit was a mosque and a poor Arab residential section, and in this raid all victims were Arabs-32 killed and 68 wounded.

-------------

The arab sector had no tradition of public service or of receiving anything from governments prior to the British administration. Representatives of the Ottoman government which ruled Palestine until 1917 would turn up in a village only to tax and arrest, just as is the case in many third world countries today. Needless to say this did not inspire respect for authority or a civic conscience in arab society. Little has changed in arab society up until now with taxation and public service ethos being notably absent in arab towns in Yehudah and Shomron, just as it is absent throughout the world. This identity with the tribe rather than the wider community was a major reason for the collapse of arab society once Israel in May 1948 went from defending its settlements to counter-attacking the sources of terror amongst the arabs who since the 1960's like to describe themselves as 'palestinian.' Villages which had pillaged jewish towns and farms at will found that when israeli forces went over to the attack, neighbouring villages were usually loathe to intervene in another village's dispute. They expected arab armies to fight the battles for them.